Yang Liu. Europe meets USA

How do people respond to “how are you” on opposite sides of the pond? Do lunch breaks change over distant longitudes? Is the boss bigger in Paris or L.A.? With the latest book in her best-selling series, Yang Liu distills the obvious and not-so-obvious contrasts between the European and U.S. experience into clever, crisp pictograms.

Europe and the USA—Yang Liu draws comparisons Yang Liu uses her wonderfully apt pictograms to display the discordances between American and European customs with wit and wisdom. In Europe meets USA she captures her own experiences of living on both sides of the Atlantic, twinkling a fresh light onto the more obvious confusions. She also reveals the less conscious prejudices that exist between the denizens of the small continent of Europe and those of the giant United States. If the usual view of our divergences is full of clichés in which there are grains of truth, the same is true in reverse. From shopping to commuting, from going to school to romance, from working to annual leave, from football to heros—with 128 pages, this linen-bound booklet invites each side to appreciate the anomalies, change perspective and look at the world through the other’s eyes.

The artist

Yang Liu was born in 1976 in Beijing. After studying at the University of Arts Berlin (UdK), she worked as a designer in Singapore, London, Berlin, and New York. In 2004 she founded her own design studio, which she continues to run today. In addition to holding workshops and lectures at international conferences, she has taught at numerous universities in Germany and abroad. In 2010 she was appointed a professor at the BTK University of Applied Sciences in Berlin. Her works have won numerous prizes in international competitions and can be found in museums and collections all over the world.

Yang Liu. Europe meets USA Yang Liu Clothbound, 13 x 13 cm, 0.21 kg, 128 pages ISBN 978-3-8365-9212-3Multilingual Edition: English, French, German, Spanish